The coroner attributed
her cause of death
to envy.

An extreme case
that tinted her corpse
a decadent shade of green.

She’d drowned in her own
perpetual drool.

From years of chronic fantasizing
for the lives of friends and family,
she’d lost her own.

In late springs of her childhood,
when the earth
was soft and ready,
she often buried
her Christmas dolls
in the backyard earth.
They’d never measured up
to those of her sister and friends.

From Betsys to Barbies
the dresses plainer coloured
the tresses of hair
less golden, or uncurled.
Her parents must have known.

Sulky blues of her early years
matured to fiery rages in her teens.
She cursed
the other girls’ fortune in landing
the cutest boys, the fashions, figures,
the latest rock albums
ahead of her.

Her way was to move in
on others’ territory
wriggling in between two female
best friends whose pairing “left her out”
or later, scheming to lure
her sister’s boyfriend for herself.

As a woman, she failed to settle in any house
for on either side of her most elaborate,
too many Joneses’ mansions rose
above her real estate,
their gardens richly flourishing
as she struggled with
her thumb, no greenness there.

All who knew her
(but made no claims
to care) lay odds
that in the funeral home
after the morticians
made her up for view,
she’d sit up in her coffin
to check out their craft,
compare it to her neighbours’
and scoff at her paltry cosmetic job.

None would put it past her
to pine about her casket’s calibre
to boot.

Not that she’d have many viewers
come to pay their respects.
The room beside her
busier at “showing time”,
confirming in her mind
she was slighted to the end.

03/23/2007

Posted on 03/23/2007
Copyright © 2024 Maureen Glaude